1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to medical knowledge systems, and more specifically, to systems for computerized long-term management of patient diseases.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Health is the ground upon which we lead our lives. Medicine is composed of diagnosis and treatment. Diagnosis means finding the cause of the patient's problem; treating is the application of the best therapy available. However, not all diseases can be completely cured by a treatment regime.
Diseases such as asthma and diabetes may require a regular schedule of treatment, termed therapy, for the duration of a patient's life. In this case, the disease is managed rather than cured. Disease management may be defined as managing a patient with a known diagnosis with the intention of providing patient education and monitoring to prevent symptom flare ups and acute episodes of the disease in order to eliminate costly medical intervention and promote patient well being. The therapy portion of disease management must be custom-tailored to the response of a particular patient since diseased patients may respond differently to the same treatment, e.g., a prescribed dosage and pharmaceuticals.
Since disease management creates reoccurring expenses to society, there is a tremendous desire to reduce costs. One must understand a capitated healthcare system in the extreme to see why the goal is worth achieving. Advocates of a fully capitated system say that everyone will win. Taken to the extreme no one will ever get sick, and doctors will be paid for never seeing patients because there wouldn't be any patients. In a fully capitated system, every person in the world pays a predetermined amount per person per month to health maintenance organizations whose sole purpose is to keep you healthy. This is an admirable goal, but impossible to achieve. However, a realizable goal is to automate the way diseases are managed.
The entire concept of disease management, carried to the extreme, is to visualize a doctor following a patient around for 24 hours a day. Of course, this is an unobtainable solution for the vast majority of the population. To reduce costs, the doctor's knowledge must be disseminated to the general public and one approach might be to not require the physical presence of the doctor at the site of the patient.
Much of medicine is algorithmic. That is, the diagnosis follows a sequence of steps to isolate the cause of the problem. Advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) and advanced trauma life support (ATLS) have shown how much care can be improved by setting standards. Some standards may be translated into medicinal algorithms, which can help set the standard of care for physicians. The concept of telephone medical advice has been proven by nationwide poison control centers, and physicians, particularly pediatricians, have practiced medicine over the telephone since it was invented. In fact, the very first words uttered over the telephone were an appeal for help, for Alexander Graham Bell had just spilled battery acid (for the batteries for the telephone) and said, "Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you" on Mar. 7th of 1876. Today's so-called telemedicine remains a one-to-one relationship. The phenomenon of telemedicine depends, in part, on best-practice guidelines helping make the practice of medicine consistent.
Disease management is nothing less than the redesign of the practice of medicine. The problem with medicine was mostly one of information and arrangement of that information. Because of the development of the personal computer and standards, advances can now be made in disease management. In the past, doctors have been the repository of medical information and the ones to "arrange" it so that it had clinical meaning. But these functions can now be performed in an automated way using the "lever" of telecommunication and computer technologies.
Disease management can involve coordinating care for patients across the entire health care continuum from birth to death. Disease management has a program available for every part of everyone's life, including prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation. The process involves managing not only the patient with a particular disease, but also the healthy patient. Too often, providers focuses on providing intensive and costly services to patients with acute episodes of disease. Disease management advocates seek a greater focus on preventive, comprehensive care to improve the health of the entire population. In a sense, disease management attempts to take the practice of medicine out of the hands of physicians and puts it into the hands of patients.
Almost all "knowledge based" clinical reasoning could be performed better and more reliability by computers. Technology will drive the democratization of medicine. A system that can automate the practice of medicine, especially in disease management, and which encourages and trains patients to play a major beneficial role in their medical health care is highly desired. Such a system should give a sustainable, substantive, and significant competitive advantage in a capitated health care marketplace. Such a system should be able to automatically identify very critical points in any disease process so that intervention is clinically, economically and humanistically maximized.